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Comment by rf15 | Hacker News Reader

Is that right? Isn't it more related to the fact that people in education/etc. actually drink more coffee for culture reasons but also use their brain more? could that be the actual reason? Because I don't see how all the coffee zombies in my workplace would last longer long term when they're already useless and aggressive today (until they had their coffee)

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This was a follow-on to a study of nurses showing coffee drinkers have lower all cause mortality.

Caffeine has been shown to exert effects via adenosine receptor antagonism and influence on cAMP & AMPK pathways. These same pathways are implicated in a lot of issues with aging. Caffeine also has some anti-inflammatory properties and Coffee beans are a strong anti-oxidant though I don't really think that matters much.

> Caffeine has been shown to exert effects via adenosine receptor antagonism and influence on cAMP & AMPK pathways. These same pathways are implicated in a lot of issues with aging.

That is like saying biological pathways are implicated in aging (because you said "pathways").

In any case, adenosine receptor antagonism has a pretty weak link if any to aging.

Additionally, we say that about virtually everything that is herbal, that it has anti-inflammatory properties. You are right, it does not matter at all.

Yes, without a good experiment (maybe a natural one [1]) we can't know. Even if the study controls for everything observable, there may be unobserved differences that lead to the caffeination difference. For instance, even though two people might have the same job, education, etc. the one who is more ambitious, or creative, or hopeful, or simply healthy enough to feel like working more, might drink more coffee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment?wprov=sfla1

The studies compared people from the same occupation, so no, that is not likely the reason

But that can still not account for cultural/work ethic differences.

Exactly. Just another “study” finding a correlation without causation.

Teasing out causation with empiricism is near impossible without eventually needing to rely on occum's razor to some extent or another.

Reliance on occum’s razor would probably be less needed if this was a random control trial, but still the study would be correlative with alternative explanations still plausible.

Regarding health, focus on calorie control and getting enough fats/carbs/protein. Eat whole foods that are high enough on the satiety index because they make calorie maintenance more intuitive so you don’t have to count calories if you don’t want to. Those (and maybe a few other tips) are the only things that have a large enough effect for one to determine with almost (only almost, because everything empirical is a confidence interval/correlation) certainty that they’re effective.

Any study saying that blueberries are “superfoods” or any other hyper-specific food recommendation, I immediately don’t trust it. There just isn’t any organization that would fund a RTC of such a niche finding, especially considering you would need to pay and surveil thousands of people over the course of their whole life to change their diet and stick to it. I don’t think even the NIH is giving out millions of dollars to a research team to find out if blueberries are superfoods.

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